Mastery

Malcom Gladwell, the author of the book The Outlier, coined the 10,000 to mastery idea saying that if you practiced something for that long, then you will be a master at it. On one hand, this is nice because it seemed to give you a definitive answer about how long you would have to do something before you mastered it. It seems to make perfect sense that if you practice and practice and practice, then you will become good at whatever it is. the downside to his theory is that the 10,000 hours is actually an average of time of the people when they got their data. So some were well over 25,000 and others were under 10,000. And over the years people have gone back to test the theory and the data. What they found is that it doent have to do with the amount of time you put in, but rather the TYPE of time that you put in. Its called"deliberate practice". This is practicing correctly. When you practice correctly you will first notice that you are making mistake. This is an important part of practice because its here where you analyze exactly what you are doing and determine specific things you need to fix to make it better. Once you figure that out then repeat the practice trying to erase this mistake for good. dont move forward until the mistake is erased. Continue to do this for the other "subsections" of the skills. From there design a "feed back loop" wheryeou can analyse the results you are getting. This will again help you to know if you are moving in the right direction with the practice you are doing. Finally, but the time in ala: "perfect practice makes perfect". This is why we try to break movements down in the gym. This is why is important that your squat is good because if it isnt, then SOOOOOO many more movements will be messed up. This is why we have you do the same warm up every day so that you have an opportunity to check yourself and your feedback loop. So you dont need 10,000 hours to master something. But you do need to make sure that the time you spend doing stuff is correct so that you are able to get to the mastery MUCH sooner!!! :)